to who the Iron Mask really was. One writer has suggested that he was an illegitimate son of Anne of Austria, the queen-mother. Another identifies him with a supposed twin brother of Louis XIV., whose birth Richelieu had concealed. Others make him the Count of Vermandois, an illegitimate son of Louis XIV.; the Duke of Beaufort, a hero of the Fronde; the Duke of Monmouth, the English pretender of 1685; Fouquet, Louis's disgraced minister of finance; a son of Cromwell, the English protector; and various other wild and unfounded guesses. After all has been said, the identity of the prisoner remains unknown. Mattioli, a diplomatic agent of the Duke of Mantua, who was long imprisoned at Pignerol and at Sainte Marguerite, was for a long time generally thought to be the Iron Mask, but there is good reason to believe that he died in 1694.

Conjecture has exhausted itself, and yet the identity of this strange captive remains a mystery, and is likely always to continue so. The fact that all the exalted personages of the day can be traced renders it probable that the veiled prisoner was really an obscure individual, whom the caprice of Louis XIV. surrounded with conditions intended to excite the curiosity of the public. There are on record other instances of imprisonment under similar conditions of inviolate secrecy, and it is not impossible that the king may have endeavored, for no purpose higher than whim, to surround the story of this one with unbroken mystery. If such were his purpose it has succeeded, for there is no more mysterious person in history than the Man with the Iron Mask.

VOLTAIRE'S LAST VISIT TO

PARIS.

NEVER had excitable Paris been more excited. Only one man was talked of, only one subject thought of; there was no longer interest in rumors of war, in political quarrels, in the doings at the king's court; all admiration and all sympathy were turned towards one feeble old man, who had returned to Paris to die. For twenty-seven years he had been absent, that brilliant writer and unsurpassed genius, the versatile Voltaire. His facile pen had given its greatest glory to the reign of Louis XV., yet for more than a quarter of a century he had been exiled from the land he loved, because he dared to exercise the privilege of free speech in that land of oppression, and to deal with kings and nobles as man with man, not as reverent worshipper with divinity. Now, in his eightyfourth year of age, he had ventured to come back to the city he loved above all others, with scarcely enough life left for the journey, and far from sure that power would not still seek to suppress genius as it had done in the past.

If he had such fears, there was no warrant for them. Paris was ready to worship him. The king himself would not have dared to interfere with the

popular idol in that interval of enthusiastic ebullition. All Paris was prepared to cast itself at his feet; all France was eager to do him honor; all calumny, jealousy, hatred were forgotten; a nation had risen to welcome and honor its greatest man, and the splendors of the court paled before the glory which seemed to emanate from that feeble, tottering veteran of the empire of thought, who had come back to occupy, for a brief period, the throne of his old dominion.

The admiration, the enthusiasm, the glory were too much for him. He was dying in the excitement of joy and triumph. Yet, with his wonderful elasticity of frame and mind, he rose again for a fuller enjoyment of that popular ovation which was to him the wine of life. The story of his final triumph has been so graphically told by an eye-witness that we cannot do better than to quote his words.

“M. de Voltaire has appeared for the first time at the Academy and at the play; he found all the doors, all the approaches, to the Academy besieged by a multitude which only opened slowly to let him pass, and then rushed in immediately upon his footsteps with repeated plaudits and acclamations. The Academy came out into the first room to meet him, an honor it had never yet paid to any of its members, not even to the foreign princes who had deigned to be present at its meetings.

"The homage he received at the Academy was merely the prelude to that which awaited him at the National theatre. As soon as his carriage was seen at a distance, there arose a universal shout of